Posted
by
Zonk
on Friday December 14, 2007 @10:44AM
from the a-nice-way-to-have-a-chat dept.

DeeQ writes with a link to a post on News.com's social networking blog. Author Caroline McCarthy wonders if Google's OpenSocial initiative has missed its moment in the sun. It's been something like six weeks now since the search giant offered up its open-source social media initiative ... but where have been the usual swift victories? Moreover, OpenSocial isn't done yet, and it's not expected until sometime next year. In the meantime Facebook is capitalizing on Google's delay, and other networks are stepping in as well. "Kraus adds that some of the independent platform strategies would be necessary even if OpenSocial were finalized. One of them is LinkedIn's 'InApps,' which also aims to spread LinkedIn's data and influence outside the business-oriented social network through partnerships with other Web sites. 'OpenSocial so far is really about how developers embed their application into a social network,' Kraus explained. 'A good chunk of LinkedIn's APIs is about how LinkedIn extends their social-networking data into other sites.'"

A year or so ago I started a myspace page just out of curiosity. I shut it down a couple months later because it really didn't do anything for me.

A couple months back I got a facebook account, and while it's more functional that the myspace page, the vast majority of the content I see there is silliness and spam. I find the applications and installation stuff a annoyance. It's also not very customizable appearance wise. Other than an occasional vacation photo from a friend I rarely see, there's not much there that helps me. I'm considering canceling that too.

What I'd really like is something like facebook that's pure communication function, and less gibberish and marketing. Actually, something like a web-based AOL could work -- email, chat rooms, IM, all built into one facebook-like web site. More elegant looking and customizable.

Just to chat? I got all these hot women moving to my area soon and they don't have any friends here. Just by random chance they found me on MySpace and are eager to meet with me. Man, I can't wait until they move in. Hot dog!

There are two uses for typical social networks. The first is to promote your band, business or service. The other is to satisfy your ego and validate your existence by constant attention-whoring. Some people will say "I use it to keep in touch with people", but that's bullshit, because it's an idiotic substitute for the telephone, email or instant messaging. So claiming that all the hassle of getting, maintaining and monitoring a social network account just to keep in touch with a few people is like saying you only get Hustler and Club for the articles.

There is a third use for them that is related to the "keeping in touch with people." The little apps in Facebook act as a mechanism for maintaining social interaction, and allow managed cross-involvement between groups of friends. In other words, I can have my brother (in Texas) join me (on the West Coast) and a colleague (in New York) over a game of Scrabble, and chat with each other. Because it aggregates all your "social attention" in one place, it isn't like trying to cobble interest in one of a million "online scrabble" sites.

And the "keep in touch" function isn't important for close friends: it's better for staying in touch with acquaintances and more distant friends, giving you a viable reason to drop a quick hello without the awkward "I know it's been years since we've chatted, but..." In the space between the deeply personal and the completely professional is a kind of sociability that is vital for many people's careers.

I like the idea of a social network. However:
a) I don't like their interface
b) I hate the idea that, on the open Internet, I am so disabled as to have my social network enabled by some corporation's single product
c) Their spying has gone over the top and I strongly dislike giving personal data to be used for advertising.

You can make similar complaints about using ANY new technology to socialize.

Why text someone, when it's an idiotic substitute for an email? But why email them, when it's a lame substitute for calling them on the phone? Why call them on the phone, when you could just talk to the person face to face? And why on earth would you want to talk to the person, when you could socialize using old fashioned grunts and gestures, which worked perfectly well for our chimp-like ancestors?

I guarantee that in a few years, some new technology will come along and people will use it to socialize. And there will be people saying, "Why would I want to use that newfangled technology to communicate with my friends, when I can use an old-fashioned social networking site?"

Your statement makes about as much sense as saying the only reason for having a Slashdot account is to satisfy your ego and validate your existence by constant attention-whoring. Who would go to all the hassle of getting, maintaining and monitoring a Slashdot account for any other reason? Look at you with your +5 by writing a trendy bashing of social networking, if that's not attention whoring?Some people will say "I use it to keep in touch with people", but that's bullshit, because it's an idiotic substitu

I think more to the point geeks prefer creating their own independent web site, rather than just having a tiny chunk of a corporate controlled and monitored web site (a social network). So the more accurate comparison is those who can roll their own or those that lack imagination, creativity and skill but still desire to create what they have been sold is ideal web impression of themselves.

So on a tech site, yeah expect the majority to look down on social network sites, where the jock straps and cheerlea

The first is to promote your band, business or service....Some people will say "I use it to keep in touch with people"

The third use is to keep in touch with bands; the flipside of the first use. You gotta be there, to get promoted to. MySpace is a pretty good way to stay on top of when/where your favorite local bands are playing.

Of course, once you start doing that, you also get to satisfy your ego and validate your existence with attention whoring.;-)

There's not much hassle with maintaining/monitoring, though. MySpace has atrocious usability, but people tend to learn to adapt to even the worst interfaces. (Ever watch someone copy a file on MS Windows with cut/paste?)

Why the hell is this modded insightful? Clearly the parent is talking out of their arse. I'm not massively into social networking site, but I do have a facebook account. Last week I went to a friend's birthday party, and now photos are up on facebook of that party. There are no better tools for this kind of thing. It's not about ego, or spamming, or anything like that, it's just about keeping in touch with friends and sharing stuff. I have spent, in my entire life, about 1/2 an hour "getting, maintain

I think this may inadvertently be the most insightful comment on this issue.

One thing we know for sure is that the people who use the social networks are not the kind of people who are afraid to change. No matter how successful Facebook has become by the time Google gets its act together, if Google comes up with some social networking tool that is really well-designed, fun and cool, and it isn't too obnoxious in the way it uses advertising and corporate boosterism, people will flock to it, leaving Facebook in the dust.

Unfortunately for Facebook (or more precisely - to whoever buys Facebook) the type of people who have made them successful are not the type of people who are going to stay with them out of loyalty if their needs aren't being met.

Call it a "fad" if you want to, but it's a matter of "Live by the Free Market, die by the Free Market." Ultimately, these outfits' need for continual growth, and growth in the rate of growth, is what's going to kill them the same way it's killing the credit/banking business. They based their very survival on the notion that everything (prices, demand, incomes, home values, etc etc) will just trend upward forever, and they leveraged themselves to an amazing extent based on this very flimsy - nay, illogical - notion. And the ugly result of this orgy of greed has barely begun. People tend to forget what happens to the fattest hogs.

One thing we know for sure is that the people who use the social networks are not the kind of people who are afraid to change....Unfortunately for Facebook (or more precisely - to whoever buys Facebook) the type of people who have made them successful are not the type of people who are going to stay with them out of loyalty if their needs aren't being met.

I'm not sure what evidence this is based on? On the contrary, to some degree people are locked in, in that you need an account to access all your friends

Just because LiveJournal sells something doesn't mean people are buying.

Wait a minute... did you...? I'm sorry (*cough*).

Not me, but people do buy. I don't think there are any official figures, but http://news.livejournal.com/100876.html [livejournal.com] suggests that the number of permanent accounts sold last time has a lower bound of 1040.

All Open Social is is a universal API format that can to code widgets and the like across Myspace, and all the other "I've never heard of these". In no way does it connect these sites, so I really don't see the purpose if I don't even know the names of half the sites it works on!

From the link:The website only gives users the option of "deactivating." However, once an account has been deactivated, all the personal information of users remain on Facebook's servers in case in the future they wish to reactivate. The website provides no means for users to permanently delete their account.

Maybe you want to take a look at Hyves (www.hyves.nl). It has all those things you like (the elegant looking part may be debatable, but it's sure nicely customizable while not as messy as MySpace). Truth is though, there are mostly Dutch people around there:)

The thing is, all of these social networking sites have a certain focus and niche.

Facebook, which started out as something for college students, is still generally focused on that particular market. Moreover, unlike MySpace, it's rather strictly controlled; you can really only search for friends in your particular networks. Plus, the inclusion (and encouragement) of user-created applications gives FaceBook a level of functionality that other networking sites lack.

LinkedIn is specifically targeted for professional, rather than social, networking.

MySpace seems to be aiming itself more at media integration, organization/campaign building, musicians, that sort of thing. (IOW, more "commercial" than the other two, if that makes any sense.)

For it to work, OpenSocial has to find its focus--it needs something to separate it from the other social networking sites beyond merely being a Google project. If it doesn't, it's just going to go the way of Friendster--it'll be out there, but nobody will really be using it.

All the existing sites you mentioned, could use OpenSocial if they wanted to.

But why would they want to? Why would Facebook want you to use MySpace apps? I think Facebook would prefer its users to be oblivious to the existence of myspace. Why would Facebook want to make the difference between myspace and itself negligible? It wouldn't. Otherwise, who would care about which social network you use? How is that attitude beneficial to a Social Network that's already one of the big players?

For it to work, OpenSocial has to find its focus--it needs something to separate it from the other social networking sites beyond merely being a Google project. If it doesn't, it's just going to go the way of Friendster--it'll be out there, but nobody will really be using it.

I think you're really missing the point. Google wants all these different networks, that have different niches, to have access to each other. So now I'll still have a facebook for friends at school, a myspace for my band, and a flickr for photos, but I won't need to upload all my photos to EVERY website using they're own implementation of photos.

There will still be different niches, but I'll be able to manage each of my different "personalities" (if you will) from one place.

...that is also what OpenSocial is not. OpenSocial is a set of standard methods and libraries for app developers to ask one particular social network for information. It is a way to provide compatibility for social networks addons, not a place or central place for anything.

Yes, finally someone here seems to get this. All of the Social Networking sites are useless to some and essential to others. It depends on your interests and needs as to which works for you. None of them are perfect.

For myself working in film and media -- Myspace is a great tool for networking. It's great for finding new writers, actors, editors, composers etc, locally and all over the world. It's a really great tool for this. In contrast, Facebook is totally worthless to me. I can't network on it if I c

What I think is interesting is how the cultures of different social network sites are themselves reflections of different strata of contemporary society itself: MySpace is generally the working class/lower-middle class/high school space (plus musicians); Facebook is middle class/collegiate (and one that most academics seem to prefer) while LinkedIn is for higher-end professionals. They have different aesthetics, just like Chez Panisse and the French Laundry have a different aesthetic from an Olive Garden, w

consolidation and settling in haven't started yet, google has plenty of time, if they come out with good stuff, it'll peel people away from the others no problem. Also, there's still a lot of people who haven't wadded in to the whole thing yet...

Nothings too late in this era. We don't even have a clear current winner. Depending on demographics, some sites are stronger than others. Also as we can see with Facebook, any public screwups can quickly change things. If Facebook hadn't reacted as fast and strongly to allay people fears regarding privacy alot of legitimate users would have migrated elsewhere. I've signed up on Myspace and Facebook but since I've a bad habit of not providing personal information to strangers these services don't really

A given individual will put value both on the fact that certain people see the material that you put about yourself online, and you also put value on the fact that certain other people are not allowed to see that material. The most simple example is the work life/private life separation, but in general many people see themselves as different personnalities (family life, social life, hobby life, professional life, love life) that are only overlapping in a carefully controlled manner. If there would be only

Google is a great company filled with brilliant people like maybe no company has ever been. But there's something I never understood about it : how do they actually plan to lock in their position ?

They do many things very well, but I don't see any of their major services from which you cannot switch to a competitor on a whim. Let's be honest : for 99% of searches, several other search engines will give you results that are at least as relevant or useful as Google's. Even if objectively you would find any google service to be slightly superior than its counterpart, there really is barely any friction from switching if you don't like their name anymore or if you feel like giving a chance to a competitor. They don't even have any notable "network effect" assets like eBay, Paypal, Facebook, Amazon Marketplace and recommendations, the IMDB, etc.

If they can get multiple (popular) sites to use the same API, so that add-on developers only have to write one version of the code, then that creates a feedback loop. It makes site developers want to use the API in order to take advantage of existing add-ons, and it makes add-on developers want to use the API to take advantage of existing sites.

The API is sold to the public as being for developers. But one of the things I quickly noticed about it, is that it's good for more than that. It's also great for crawlers. Why crawl a site and try to make sense out of their HTML structure, when there's an API call to get someone's friends list? If sites adopt this API, it will allow Google (not really lock-in; any other crawler could do it too) to make semantic sense of "social" websites, which happen to be popular. Maybe some day you'll be able to google "friends:El Cabri" and get all sorts of ideas for ways the info could be [ab]used. Crawling is part of Google's business anyway (they're a/the leader) so this could strengthen them.

That's a main reason why I hesitate to invest in Google stock. I see a lot of potential but then I also see a lot of alternatives to what Google offers. Strictly judging Google as a business I cannot predict the course they are going to take. They are full of brilliant people and should be churning out alot of great stuff, but if you think about it a lot of the succesful stuff they have have been bought not made inhouse.

Yeah, what's the point of even being in business if you have to compete fairly instead of locking people in?

I'd argue that most products and services are not natural monopolies; otherwise, capitalism would not work and no country would use it. Microsoft's position is great if you happen to be Bill Gates, but it's a drag on everybody else in every other industry (why do people outside slashdot fail to recognize that?)

Google better thank their lucky stars there's no search lock-in, because otherwise google could never have displaced altavista, yahoo, microsoft, and everybody else who came along before google. At the same time, google better stay on its toes.

Google is a great company filled with brilliant people like maybe no company has ever been.

I don't believe that for a second (Bell Labs, for example? Toyota, Lockheed, Merck, IBM, Philips, Sony, Xerox...?) but wouldn't it be sad if it were true? They should come over here and develop new drugs; I'll be glad to cover making Web 2.0 apps that never get out of beta.

In the beginning Google was attractive to me, (and most people I know), because it was "clean." No annoying graphics, just a simple text box, that produced very readable, very good results, with advertising that was textual, and not a eppilepsy enducing "you won a playstation" flashing banner.

Their search products such as Image Search, Froogle, News, etc... all did the same thing... clean UI, easy to use, good results.

For their applications, I think people moved to Gmail because again, the clean UI, they

Dude, who was your ISP then? And what freemail services were these? I remember those days well. All the ISPs I'd tried had a 6 - 10 MB limit. Freemail providers were dropping rapidly; yahoo had dropped new accounts from 6 to 4 MB, and hotmail was down to a pitiful 2 MB. At the time, the amount of space gmail was offering was unbelievable. No one else was doing anything like it, and it took more than a year for others like yahoo to catch up

Google makes money by selling ads and stock.Ads are annoying at best.Stock is speculative.Google's stock will start to fall (Google has been remarkably overpriced for a remarkably long time), investors will want to maximize profits, and they will cash out. Unless people invested in a.com for the long term, of course (insert lulz here).

Once this happens, Google will either fail spectacularly, or the company will start acting like, I don't know, a company.Suddenly employees won't be getting free massages, d

1) Google counts on the same psychological effect that the entire advertising industry counts on to keep people consuming its product: branding. The average human beings' tendency is to stick with what is familiar. They were able to provide a search engine service (at the time) markedly superior to what was available (Yahoo, Altavista, & Hotbot), so now people go to them for searches, rather than some place else. Its the same with McDonald's, Charmin, and S

I looked at the OpenSocial API. I think any Google initiative has some potential. However, this API is such a mess, really a hodgepodge of cruft, mainly from Orkut, that it won't go anywhere not because it's too late but simply because it's so ill considered.

If they created a well thought out API it would get much more traction.

Dude(tte)s,As someone who has used facebook a bit, I can say it sucks! There are tons of opportunties to make something better (or worse, depending on your point of view), and Google is one company trying to do so.

Was Google too late when it started its search engine years after the first engines? Was gmail too late because Rocketmail was first? Was wikipedia too late, because Brittanica was already there? For that matter, was Facebook too late, because email had already existed for decades?

Too Late To Be A Win?Yeah, I guess time has always counted, like with IBM and the personal computers, or MS Windows and the graphical operating systems, or iPod and the portable media players, or Google and search engines (yes, there was altavista, excite and yahoo before google) or Xbox and video game consoles or...

I don't know - I was skeptical about Facebook's API when I learned that our company would be developing apps for its platform. But it's actually pretty impressive. You have several different views and footprints at your application's disposal, a number of different ways to promote your app, an easy route to making your application interactive (FBML) as well as more advanced methods (FQL, the web service API).

Contrast that with OpenSocial. I recently wrote a white paper on it, which I wouldn't mind getting feedback on. It should make OpenSocial's strengths (and its significant weaknesses) pretty apparent:

A First Look at OpenSocial [concretewebsites.com]
Answering Questions About Google's Effort at Standardizing Social Network Widgets, and the Creation of Your First OpenSocial Widget .

It seems to me that Google is right on time: the time in the sun for social networks seems to be about up.
Call it a land rush; call it a bubble; call it a craze. The social networks like FaceBook, MySpace, and the social network apps like Digg enjoyed a moment in the sun as the fleshed out one dimension of the webbernet that hadn't really been fully articulated. Now that it has, you're seeing a lot of the ideas articulated by those sites rolled into more mature, more complex, and more interesting sites an

I don't want my LinkedIn profile on other sites. All I'll get is spam.

LinkedIn has a problem with "LinkedIn Open Networkers", i.e. spammers, who just use LinkedIn to troll for contacts. Since LinkedIn doesn't have forums, they troll by using the "LinkedIn Answers" feature to ask bogus "questions". Much more of that and the question-answering system will be useless.

From summary, "where have been the usual swift victories?".
Gmail is still in Beta. It's taken years and years to get a customer base and most peons I know still use Hotmail.
Google Search itself took a long time to catch on after being late comer in the Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves.com, crowded marketplace.
Sometimes first-to-market is a good strategy, but in other times simply good software wins out in the end. That said, I have no experience with OpenSocial, but this seems to be someone saying, "1,000,000 peo

It's been something like six weeks now since the search giant offered up it's open-source social media initiative... but where have been the usual swift victories?

Huh? What swift victories? It took Google Search years to reach the top. Google Mail still isn't dominant, not even close, etc... etc... Googles only real victories are AdWords, Search, and Maps. Their other 'victories' come from buying existing lines of business (Blogger, YouTube) or from having no real competitors (Docs).

"...updates seem to come pretty far apart and scattershot"
Must be all those massages and conferences that their employees attend. Everyone spends half their time brain storming rather than implementing. I'm not saying that's a bad thing if the company can afford it. It's better than Microsoft's copy everyone else mentality.
And as for the concept of locking in your customers, that's one reason I use gmail instead of hotmail/live/msn. I've setup a few new small company websites where the owners were usin

A lot of Google's projects have been steady gainers rather than swift victories. OpenSocial clearly has a tough road ahead, but I wouldn't count it out just because it's off to a slow start; that's simply to be expected for this kind of project.